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Hands-On With The Kindle
Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."
I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.
I'm not the NYT's typical top-ten reader, so I'm not sure something like this would immediately appeal. The last few books I've read were printed from 10 to 50 years ago, which would place them well beyond this device. Pros and Cons just don't weigh enough in favour and like I said, what does this do that a tablet couldn't do? Maybe when they drop it to ~$50 and I can sync it like my iPod to my favourite content feeds each morning it would hold some promise.
Also, books don't require batteries. I've got several devices around now, which all have some form of rechargeable (and expensive to replace) cells. I worry a bit about the availability of replacement cells several years down the road.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.
And it is in Amazon's interest to show people who might otherwise buy material how to avoid buying material... how?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood
If I'm not tied to a single source for my books then I may consider it, but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Ah, so it's more Kindle-ing for the e-book's fire, eh? OW OW OWWW! No hard fruits! *Watermelowned*
Demented But Determined.
But it's a 14 minute video! Linked from the front page of Slashdot!!
Oh my.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I think the Kindle will be to traditional books as this device is to walking.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
Take a look at the specs.
This thing doesn't sync, nor use WiFi. Instead, it downloads content through Sprint's wireless 3G network (the same one that their phones use). There is no subscription fee for this (the data service). It will also download newspaper and magazine subscriptions daily (no syncing or need to find a WiFi hotspot).
Perhaps their pricing model is built around including some type of specially negotiated data plan with Sprint that is amortized over the projected lifetime of the device. (Just speculation).
If you load up a few hundred titles, it is no longer heavier.
It uses e-ink, not LCD for the display. This means it's easier to read in bright light (and conversely impossible to read in total darkness.)
I would guess looking at the specs it's lighter than most books, water issues are exactly what the reviewer is talking about.
This just in, Gutenberg wins again!
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.
Please. Just pass them by.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
a digital book should *NOT* be 10 dollars. i don't care if its a new book and only available as a hardcover for 18 bucks. i'm not spending 10 bucks for it. when the paperback is released, it still looks like the price of the e-book costs about the same, if not a little cheaper than the paperback. if they were selling new releases for like 2 bucks and paperback-released books for a buck (or just sell them all for 99 cents a piece), it would be a huge factor for people who buy a lot of books. it means they may eventually start saving money in the long run if they read that often. plus, it may entice people just to read more often in the first place or to even purchase books on impulse. they may not even read all the books they purchase if its at that price. i think they'd sell a lot more books and make more money due to having lower production costs. books are priced more than music. once the music/filesharing fiasco ends (which will probably be within this decade), books will be next. its a fringe market right now, but more and more books are becoming available online.
I read that the thing does not handle PDFs. Is this true?
If it doesn't, why would anyone buy it?
For that price, the Asus Eee PC is a better deal. I got one - neat little thing and it can actually be used for real work, since with SSH, I can do anything with it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You know, I think I have a theory on why people get so upset about the idea of digital book readers. It's not the DRM, it's not the batteries, it's not whether you can loan your book...
The biggest problem is ego.
People who read a lot of books LIKE having huge bookshelves to impress people on how many books they have. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO read more than thou, hence, I am more intelligent. Bow down and kiss my ring!"
How many of these people keep around books they know they will NEVER read again? Why not donate them to the library, and clear up space on the ol' bookshelf? Because they like having the scorecard on the wall. Having an e-book spoils all the fun.
I think this is actually a generational thing. I'm noticing that younger people have no problem downloading scanned books, reading them, and moving on. I think the ego stroke of the big library will eventually be extinct, like we're seeing with big walls of record collections.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A lot of the same kinds of comments are coming up here as in other forums about the Kindle.
Firstly, even though this article points out explicitly that you can put your own content on the Kindle, lots of people still seem to refuse to believe it. You can! And you can use USB to backup the files, as well.
Secondly, DRM isn't really Amazon's fault. All publishers are really, really aware of electronic rights. There are major disputes between the Author's Guild and publishers because of this. Recently, in particular, there was a big fight with Simon & Schuster. There is simply no way that anyone, either authors or publishers, are going to give up these rights. Maybe a particular author will give away an old book for free over the 'net, but not in general. Both authors and publishers have to eat. Allowing everyone to copy their books is not going to happen. Amazon had no choice but to comply.
The Palm T|X sells for around $150 these days.
:)
I've been using one for over 2 years as my eBook reader of choice, and almost never open a regular book now. Toss PalmFiction on it, and you have a top notch e-book reader that can read HTML, MS Word, RTF, Text, PalmDoc and a number of other DRM-unencumbered formats.
Want a more integrated experience? There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc.
Project Gutenberg encodes their documents in Plucker format, which has a native PalmOS reader.
The T|X has WiFi and Bluetooth support, and can connect to the internet via cellphone BT link, WiFi router, USB uplink with a computer, or even IrDA.
It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text. Text can be displayed at any size and be linked to dictionary lookup/wikipedia/etc. Plus, the device fits in my pocket, so I'm actually likely to have it when I want to read a book.
Apart from the eBook features, the device can link to common calendaring and address book apps, browse the web, etc., act as a VoIP phone if you install a microphone, be used to watch movies, listen to music, CREATE content and take advantage of the thousands of software applications written for the PalmOS platform.
Oh, and it can run Linux too
The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.
.LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.
It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.
The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."
But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.
Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.
As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft
Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.
On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.
The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.
I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.
DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Amazon says that their PDF handling is currently experimental, but that you can convert it.
If you look around, you'll find that PDF support is an issue for pretty much all of these devices. Sony's reader, for instance, can view PDF, but it is unreadable. This isn't a coincidence.
Years ago in the e-book business there were heated debates between the reader-first and the publisher-first groups. The former wanted readers to be able to enlarge, shrink or reformat books however they want. The latter want to be able to control every pixel on the screen, so that it will actually look good. For instance, the classic Alice in Wonderland illustrations flow around the text, which only works if the formatting is fixed.
These e-books are reader-first devices: they let readers reformat books to whatever they want. PDFs are publisher-first. And how do you fit a 8.5x11 inch PDF page on a small screen? If you scale it, then it'll likely be unreadable. If you force everyone to scroll around the page, that'll likely make it irritating to use. There's probably a reasonably good solution, but it certainly isn't going to be easy!
Really? Okay, I'll just toss these ebooks in the fire and stuff a dozen hardcover books into my jacket pocket. While I'm walking home in the rain I will open one up and yell "SEARCH, DAMN YOU!" at it until it flips open to the page I need. When I get home I will tear out the pages I need, fold them up and slip them into the CD-ROM drive on my PC, hoping that it will somehow figure out how to import the a few sentences and a diagram into a paper that I'm working on...
And then I'll go out and search for some more non-existant benefits to using eBooks.
Don't get me wrong, I like real books just find and am quite happy lugging around big stacks of paper, but there are many cases where eBooks are much more convenient than traditional printed volumes.
Memo to Bezo-man, CEO d'Amazon:
... a lot
... or ... if this thing pisses me off I want the option to take all that shit I paid real money for and really keep it _and_ use it on something else. ... without stupid converter tool ... you know ... the ebook equivalent of the stuff a lot of us book people and geeks --your core audience-- do with paper books
Preface,
Dude you really really need to talk to people outside the early adopter, gadget/freak crowd. In anything remotely resembling the device's current form, this device is doomed.
First give it buying appeal:
*) Drop the price
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
*) I shouldn't have to pay Amazon everytime I blink
Make it a little less geeky
*) Make it so the keyboard can be slid out of the way
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
Make the content have a life longer than the device
At some point your content will outlive the device:
1) It fails (and stockholders will make them pull the plug)
2) It succeeds (and to survive the imitators, it becomes non-backward compatible)
3) You just want the latest version and want to take your content with you
4) The darn thing breaks/gets stolen/etc
Since everything has to go through Amazon for a fee, if you want to keep all that stuff you paid for, you're going to pay how many times per device switch times how many devices in your life?
Give me the ability to do all those book things
*) Support more document formats (text, pdf and html should be a bare minimum)
*) Have content longevity (see previous section)
*) Don't give me anything in a proprietary format
*) Let me push stuff from my computer to my kindle directly
*) Let me do annotations/notes/highlighting on pdfs and ship the modified doc back to my computer
*) For bonus points, give me the option to search both the content of books and my notes
*) For double bonus points, make that search rip through my annotations
*) For even more bonus points, give me a Mac/Windows App to manage my docs (think iTunes)
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Heresy!
But it's true, and I've been saying it for at least five years, ever since I first got my Rocket eBook reader. Read the article, and you'll understand why. Yes, eBook readers have some downsides, but not many, and they're trivial compared to the upsides -- assuming, of course, that you can get the books you want in electronic format.
Until you've done it, you simply can't understand how liberating it is to be able to read without holding the book in your hands. As the author of the article says, he found he could read while eating, holding his daughter, even running hard on a treadmill. And he's absolutely right that a good eBook device is "invisible" -- within a minute or two you completely forget that you're using it, because it gets out of the way of the content that it's presenting. Reading on your PDA or your laptop is not the same thing at all, because those devices don't get out of the way. Laptops are too big, too heavy, too powerhungry and PDAs are too small.
Here's my bottom line on just how much better eBooks are: My choice of reading materials has adapted to what I can get electronically, because I find paper books so annoying. Luckily, I was already a fan of much of the stuff from Baen Books, and they provide all of their stuff in electronic, DRM-free format for a very reasonable price (half the price of a paperback for single books, and about $2 per book if you buy their Webscription bundles). Because of the super convenience of an eBook, I now read almost nothing but Baen's titles.
BTW, as for reading in the tub: I've been doing it for years with my eBook. Just don't drop it in the water and you're fine (have you ever dropped a paperback in the tub? I haven't). If you're really worried about it, though, there's a very inexpensive and simple solution: Get a big ziploc baggie and put your eBook in it. Seal it up tight and you have no worries about water, sand or anything else getting in, and you'll have no problem pushing the buttons or reading through the clear plastic. I find that I can read eBooks in many places that I wouldn't take a hardcover book, because I'd be too afraid of damaging it, and it's not feasible to read a paper book wrapped in plastic. I also like the fact that my LCD-display eBook reader is readable in the dark. The Kindle isn't, but it's better in daylight (my eBook works in full sunlight, too, but it is a little harder to see).
eBooks are the future not because they're cool gadgets but because they make for a better reading experience.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.
:-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower!
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I received my Kindle two days after launch and have been using it steadily since then. What do I like best? Bottom line it's the "always connected" capability. I use this for downloading books (natch), newspapers, blogs (/. was the first...) and web browsing (lost count of the number of times that a quick check of Wikipedia has settled a breakfast/lunchtime/dinner argument). I've also taken to downloading the first chapters (free) of books in which I may be interested. I'm glad I did in many case - the hype behind books does not always match reality (natch again). I downloaded chapter 1 of Steve Colbert's "I am America" - god knows how that's at the top of the NY Times best seller list, it's *awful*. Glad I could read chapter 1 and realize this was not a book for me. (and no, it wasn't the politics that turned me off - it's just poorly written prose. Mr. Colbert should focus on what's he's good at: TV)
As for the cost: It's fine given that it has bundled always-on wireless access. If I had to pay $25 a month for wireless for the device and if the device was, say, $100 - I'd be out of pocket in 12 months. TCO is good. Look past the $400 price tag and realize what you are getting for the money. A version 1 ebook (it's pretty good - will get better with V2, V3.....) and 24x7x365 wireless access to a huge library. Good value in my book!
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
Yeah, but the fact that Amazon is threatening to delete everything about you, including digital things you've paid for just shows how nefarious DRM is and how draconian Amazon can be when you do something they don't like. How about just making a business rule in their software that doesn't let you buy more than 3 Wii's instead of letting someone potentially do it with a huge threat over their head. And I'm also mad about the fact that I paid for content that I feel that I don't really own and they can take away from me at any time.
My biggest problem E-books is how easy they are (the DRMed ones) to centrally control. The Ministry of Truth was an expensive operation, what with collecting, incinerating, and reprinting books they wanted to change. E-books can be "updated" at the push of a button. WORM media and the kind of widespread copying publishers hate are our weapons against the rise of the Ministry of Truth.
Amazon is touting this as the iPod of e-book readers ... it's actually the Zune of e-book readers.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
- My paperbacks don't cause radio interference with my speakers
- Zoom is really intuitive - just hold the book closer and closer
- My favorite popup books are 3D. The Kindle won't do 3D for another 10 years.
- I actually like the color Best Buy ads when I read a newspaper since I'm a gadget freak
- I can use crappy books for kindling. The Kindle just doesn't live up to its name in this regard.
- While on the subject of fire, blasphemous book burnings are way cooler than blasphemous ebook deletions.
I think that people who look down on people with lots of books are insecure about their own reading habits.
What - that's a load of crap I pulled out of my ass? Congrats. You're right.
Here's what I do know though - you're full of crap about why people like having books, why people read, and ultimately, why people like large libraries. It's for the same reason that people collect records, plates, coins, stamps, insects, door knobs and other things: they like the objects, and they like collecting them. Books tend to have a specific place of honor because for the longest time, they were the only way that knowledge was passed down. As a result, a large library correlated strongly with being learned, which was why they used to be status symbols.
Today, they're merely an indication of a person's passion. Looking down on people with large libraries says the same thing about you as does looking down on people with any other pastime; be it baseball, baseball cards or collecting train tickets: you're a pompous ass who needs external validations for why you're a worthy individual.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I remember the slashdot comments about the iPod when it first debuted. For those who don't, let's just say it looked about like these comments on the Kindle, lots of hate everywhere from people who had never seen, let alone used the device. The complaints were pretty much identical, too (DRM!, too expensive!, how is this better than a laptop?).
Thus, I'll go ahead and predict the success of the Kindle here and now. Within 2 years 90% of slashdot readers will own one, and those who don't will own a knock off that runs open source firmware.
This is suppose to be a READING device and it's got a keyboard that takes up like 30% of the surface area... That seems like very bad design to me!
Do you really think that you're paying $100 for the physical artifact when you buy a textbook? You're really just paying what the publisher can get away with because everyone has to buy it.
Go to a normal bookstore and look at the prices for books that are the same size and weight as textbooks. They're all around $50 or $60.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
As others have mentioned, eInk basically works like paper. The brighter the light, the easier it is to read. It's also much easier on the eyes than a traditional screen.
However, when it comes to reading traditional books I often find it hard to find a position that's comfortable for holding the book open and also turning the pages (this is particularly a problem in bed). Being able to hold the device stationary and just press a button with my thumb to advance is quite appealing.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Let's see, compared to the OLPC XO laptop, this thing ain't that great.
The OLPC has a keyboard, and has the ebook mode. You'll get something between 20 and 24 hours of reading in the ebook B/W mode on the OLPC. It has a great shock and water resistant case, I believe you can leave it out in the rainstorm.
David Pogue with NYT demonstrated dropping it on a really jagged rock from about 5 feet off the ground, then threw water on it, then through dirt on it. Plus the OLPC is 400 AND you are donating one to a child in a developing country.
You could get 2 OLPC and totally share ebooks instantly. The mesh networking allows download, plus has regular internet and browser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoghPvyhts
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
The bookeen does not support Linux, even though it is linux-based... go figure. Read the FAQ under point 8 "The Mobipocket Desktop Reader is not available fro Mac and Linux. On these machines, the Cybook is seen as a simple external storage drive and the Mobipocket files must be transferred manually." I guess you could say they are being nice by not deliberately locking-out non-windows users, but if I'm gonna pay that much, then ALL features should work for Linux. Furthermore, it doesn't look like there's a linux prog out there that does the same thing as mobipocket or ereader. I would love to be corrected on this point but that's what I've seen so far.
The specific incompatibility is this: the software that the reader uses for synchronization, "mobipocket", is windows-only. The features seem really cool though - it can even download RSS feeds so you can view them offline. The WINE Entry for this program says it crashes frequently so that's not an answer(Does wine ever work right?)
Also noticed... ebooks can sometimes cost more than their paper-based counterparts.
Now, start browsing. Yes, New-York-Times bestsellers are $9.99 or lower. Sadly few of the books in the Computers and Internet section are significantly cheaper than the physical versions: Fred Brook's Mythical Man Month - $25.91 in eBook format. Martin Fowler's Refactoring - $35.87. Joshua Block's Effective Java - $39.99. To be fair, not all computer-science books cost that much but $25+ for an eBook is too much for me.
So while the overall selection is good and the prices on a lot of large-print-run books are great, it looks to me like the publishers are sticking with the view that books with low print runs must be priced higher, even when electronic. Too bad. I was hoping Amazon eBooks would let me carry more of the stuff that interests me beyond literature.